Matthew 28:1-10

I love Easter. I love everything about Easter. I love it because it signals the spring, with warm breezes and flowers and pretty colors. I love it because people become more upbeat and happier. I love Easter because so often I see sadness turn into joy. I see people in dark places come into light.

I love Easter because I have experienced Good Friday, with its ugliness and despair, and because Good Friday is not the end. After Friday comes Sunday, and that Sunday is a Resurrection. He who was dead is alive.

I love Easter because in my own life I have discovered that, although the Good Fridays can be agonizing and seem to last forever, if I keep faith, they lead to glorious resurrections. God is faithful, and continues to be faithful. No bad time lasts forever, and out of the bad comes good.

I live Easter because God took the worst moment in human history and turned it into the most glorious moment. From darkness to light, from death to the Resurrection.

A good friend of mine, Eric Fellman, once President of the Peale Center for Christian Living, tells a story about the local town character. Every town seems to have one, a person who is beloved and protected by everybody but also viewed as a bit odd. In Eric’s town he is a retired artist, often seen standing by the side of the road with his knapsack, hitchhiking outside of town, where he spends his days collecting bottles, cans and other useful litter along the sides of the roads. One day Eric saw him hitchhiking and picked him up. As they rode along, they passed a ridge on top of which stood a group of trees whose branches had been violently shorn off by a recent storm. It was a dark, drizzly fall day, and as he looked at those scarred trees against the desolate sky Eric commented, “Isn’t it sad to see trees destroyed?”

And the old man responded, “But think of how glorious it’s going to be in springtime when the damage will be covered by new growth.”

Reflecting on this later, Eric said the old man’s observation seemed far superior to his own. “My view of the scars on the trees,” he said, “was what I was seeing in the moment. His view was what would be. His response was laced with hope.”

What the old man saw when he looked at those trees is what Easter is all about for me. It is faith and hope rewarded. It is darkness overcome, brokenness made whole, scars covered over with new life and new growth.

Easter tells us God still is in charge of the universe. It not only celebrates Jesus’ Resurrection, but also represents the hope of our individual resurrections. It is a demonstration that God never gives up on anybody. That is an extraordinary fact that is always present with us, and it shouts to the whole world that Easter is love’s greatest triumph.

Paul Zahl, an Episcopal priest in Charleston, South Carolina, coined a brilliant phrase: “God raises us up by meeting us at the bottom.” I resonate with that. So much of my life seems to be lived on the bottom. It may not appear that way to others, but that’s the way it feels to me. And it means everything to know that God will meet me at the bottom to raise me up!

The spiritual writer Oswald Chambers has also brought me comfort and support through his insight that God’s purpose, God’s whole reason for being, is in our process. Wherever we are, whatever we’re about, God is there. If we will give God a chance, God will be present in that process to bring us where we need to be.

You may have read that in the spring of 1996 a group of people gathered in New York City to hold what they called a Resurrection Summit. This was not a gathering to affirm the wonder and the joy of the Resurrection, but to argue about it. They discussed age-old controversies, including whether Jesus was resurrected physically. If not, did somebody take the body out of the tomb and hide it?

Many people are confused by the variances in the Gospel stories. As you know, the Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke and John—have four different accounts of the Resurrection. There is a general lack of clarity. In some places it refers to the physical body and in others a body that could walk through doors and walls—a body that the disciples, Jesus’ best friends, did not immediately recognize.

Of course, when I was a young boy I believed in the Resurrection because I was supposed to. Everyone around me believed it, and so I did, unquestioningly. Then when I was in college and seminary and became aware of the variances in the story as described in the Bible, and the questions raised about exactly what was factual, I began to do my own thinking and processing and came to the belief that the Resurrection did not happen.

You might ask, “Were you preaching when you didn’t believe it?”  Yes, I was, but knowing something had happened and knowing Christ as the Lord of my life, I followed the teaching of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, who taught, “Preach faith until you get it!”  And that is what I was doing.

But today I believe in the Resurrection, firmly so. It is just as real, just as solid in me as any belief I have. If Jesus had not been resurrected, if He had not appeared in some very strong way, His disciples, who were confused and unfocused, would have simply dispersed. They weren’t secure enough; they didn’t believe strongly enough.

But in the days and weeks after the Resurrection, something happened to those men. They did 180-degree turns. They got their acts together. They became so convinced of the Resurrection that wherever they went they told the story with a passion. Most of them were martyred. They gave everything. Yes, something happened. It was the living presence of the Christ that kept them going. And because of what they experienced we are here today relating to the same Resurrection. Whatever the facts are, the truth is that Jesus rose from the dead.

There are other reasons now why I believe. One of them may surprise you—maybe you have had this experience as well—but often, at a funeral or memorial service, I will feel the presence of God and the life after death like at no other time, especially when the person was a person of faith and spiritual greatness. There is something that transcends the moment.

Also, many of you have helped me to believe. You have no idea how I draw on your faith. I see the firmness and strength of your conviction and it sustains me during those times when my own faith cannot.

My mother is another reason I believe in the Resurrection. Now that I can reflect more maturely on her life, I realize she spent most of her life afraid and probably very depressed. But so often in the springtime, as she was vacuuming, or cooking, I would hear her sing from Handel’s Messiah, “I know that my redeemer liveth.”

I believe in the Resurrection because of my father. When he was forty years old he was in a bad automobile accident. For four days he was in a coma, and he had a near-death experience. He was in a beautiful place with lots of light, and he began to cross over. Then he heard, “It isn’t time to go, Thomas. You’ve got to come back and take care of your family.”  And he came back. He was never afraid of death after that.

I believe in the Resurrection because of something the Dalai Lama wrote:

One time in a monastery in Spain, near Barcelona, I met a Christian monk who spent five years in a hermitage behind the monastery. When I visited there he came to see me. His English was not good, in fact it was worse than mine. We couldn’t talk much. We looked at each other’s face. I got a very happy experience, some kind of vibration. This helped me to understand the real result of Christian practice. Christianity has a different method, tradition, philosophy...yet it produces such a person. I asked him, “What did you practice during your years in solitude?”

“I concentrated on love,” he told me.

Easter is love’s greatest triumph. When the Dalai Lama looked into the face of the Spanish monk, he experienced the resurrected spirit, and that’s what drew him in oneness to that monk.

In the spring of 1980 the well-known faith healer, Olga Worrall, came to speak at Marble Church. After her talk she was tired, so we went off to a private room. We were making small talk when suddenly she interrupted me and asked, “Arthur, did you have a brother who died recently?” I told her yes, that my younger brother had died the previous July. “Your father and mother, they’ve gone on, haven’t they? I see three people standing behind you.” Then she described my mother, my father, and my brother, adding, “They want to say they are very happy for you and are proud of you.” That experience has made an enormous difference for me.

I believe in the Resurrection. I believe in life after death. I believe there is a very thin veil between the mortal life and the spiritual life, and that when we die we make a transition to the other side. Where we start on the other side is exactly where we leave off here. That’s one reason I am trying to do as much work with this life as I can.

I believe God takes care of us, that God is always in process of raising us up. Faith is all we need to bring to it. Trust that God knows God’s business, that God really cares, really loves you,  and is in your process. Any Good Friday experience that you are having, just hold on and trust. The ugliness and meanness of your Good Friday, the agony and despair of it, if you keep the faith, will result in the most incredible resurrection, beyond anything you could imagine. I love Easter. I believe in the Resurrection.

You can keep this Resurrection spirit, this fullness, every day of your life if you will simply make a pact with yourself to celebrate each day. One of the more popular verses in the Judeo-Christian tradition comes from the 118th psalm:

This is the day which the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.

God continually gives us the gift of a new day. We are wise when we try to find some way to celebrate life and rejoice in each new day.

Children can be very helpful to us in doing this. We need to go back a little bit and get back in touch with the innocence and excitement we felt in childhood. We need to remember how to be playful and light and joyous. Don’t say those days are gone. We have to recapture some of the feeling we had as children if we are to live fully as adults.

One of the many poets interviewed by Bill Moyers in a recent PBS series was Coleman Barks. At one point they were talking about those unexpected and wondrous moments in life when we feel in touch with the eternal. Everything is normal and then all of a sudden something mystical happens. We can’t plan or demand these moments of eternity; they just happen. This is the work of the spirit. This is the activity of God. Barks was talking about his belief that people have a core that is ecstatic, that recognizes these moments and responds with wonder.

In response to a question from Moyers about what he meant by ecstasy, Barks began to talk about his boyhood in Chattanooga,  Tennessee, and the golden April sunsets there. He would get so excited by their beauty that he couldn’t stand it; he would lie down and hug himself. “Mama, Mama, I have that full feeling again.”  And she replied, “I know you do, honey.”  Barks felt his mother had given him a great gift. “I grew up knowing it was okay to lie on the floor and hug myself,” he said.

So let us keep the Easter spirit alive, let us keep the ecstatic awareness of what this is all about.  Let us have the Resurrection spirit; let us have hope. Let us find ways to celebrate life, to get in touch with the ecstasy of childhood and express it in adulthood. Let us be like young Coleman Barks. “Mama, I feel full again, and I’m hugging myself.”

May I commend to you that in the fullness you not only hug yourself, but you also hug life—and that you hug each other. We need each other. We need to say, “I love you.” We need to say, “I believe in you.”  We need to say, “You hurt me but I forgive you; let’s start over again, let us have a resurrection of the relationship.” These things can happen with faith and patience and some hard work.

Please remember that God is in our process. God meets us at the bottom and raises us up.

Let us pray.

Lord God, You have given us a wonderful gift: the gift of Jesus the resurrected Lord who gives us courage, strength and light, and the hope that when we go through our long Good Friday periods, when we are scraping bottom, there comes after that, with faith, the Resurrection. After Friday comes Sunday. Thank You, God. Help us along the way. In Christ’s name we ask, Amen.